Morgan Clarke is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Keble College. He previously held a Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. He has conducted fieldwork in Lebanon since 2003, and is the author of Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon (2009) and many articles on the anthropology of Islam and the Middle East.

• Introduction; Part I. Contextualising Sharia Discourse in Lebanon: 1. Court, community and state – a legal genealogy; 2. The consequences for civility; 3. Becoming a shaykh; 4. Lessons in the mosque; Part II. Sharia within the State: 5. Introducing the sharia courts; 6. Marriage before God and the state; 7. Bringing a case; 8. Rulings and reconciliation; 9. The judge as tragic hero; 10. The wider world of the sharia; 11. Reform and rebellion; Part III. Sharia outside the State: 12. Becoming an ayatollah; 13. Making law from the bottom up; 14. The limits of authority; Conclusion.

'Morgan Clarke's Islam and Law in Lebanon is a superb study of the multiple registers of Islamic law both within and beyond the purview of the Lebanese state and its legal system. Through a close and incisive examination of discourses, individuals and institutions which participate in the discussion about the nature of Islamic law in contemporary Lebanon, Clarke draws attention to important, often overlooked dimensions of the dynamics between states, their laws and Sharia.' Guy Burak, New York University